“Alert. Ambient temperature within comfortable margin.” Journey chimed in my ear, waking me from my meditation.

Around me, the small familiar room had taken on a different look compared to what it had been the first time I’d stepped foot. The walls glistened slightly, condensation forming on the sides. The small heater I’d brought with me remained humming, fighting a hard battle to keep this single room heated.

It wasn’t perfectly insulated with any sort of quality, unlike the ribboned doors that I’d passed earlier. But a room was still a room, and with a heater constantly supplying power, I had created a small pocket of habitable air here, deep within the mothballed sections of House Winterscar.

Getting this heater on the sly was a little difficult to arrange. If I ordered a portable heater and then disappeared for a few hours, the connections could quickly be made. So I had to give a good excuse where I’d be and a more subtle approach to swiping the heater.

Hard part had been done now. Within this small pocket of warm air, I was free and truly safe from all prying eyes. No one could accidentally reach me, since they’d have to make a full journey through the dark zones.

A small cloud of wispy grey had been actively swaying from all parts of the armor, reaching out to the room like tentacles. It was fascinating to watch.

I’d discovered a few novel things from poking my nose into Journey so far. Namely how the bloody hell it managed to cycle clean air in the suit, even if completely submerged. There was no obvious tank of air anywhere that anyone could see.

The answer lay in how the suits repaired themselves - they could destroy matter, and recreate it, within hardwired limits. All Journey did was destroy carbon dioxide and recycle it into oxygen, with a few other gases to balance. It only cost some energy to do so, which was where a fair percentage of the power cells it ate went to.

In this room, the stale air had long ago gone bad according to Journey. Not totally bad, but not great for my health either. What Journey was doing right now was acting as a magic air purifier. With each swipe of those reaching tendrils, the air it passed through was converted into something more breathable. I didn’t need to move, the heater was causing a gentle wind within this closed room, so new air was constantly being cycled where Journey caught and filter it.

Soon enough, Journey chimed that the room was ready enough. So, heated enough and clean enough. Time to get to work.

I unhooked Journey’s helmet, setting it down and taking a breath of the air here. Smelled slightly stale, but not overly so. A breath out and I saw the vapor mist billowing out of my mouth. It was still cold enough to nip at my cheeks and nose, but certainly habitable. The poor heater wasn’t going to perfectly warm this room up considering the oppressive temperature right past the walls and sealed doorway. There were too many leaks.

That’s fine. I had brought a good amount of power cells with me. I could tank the cost.

There was a reason I needed to be able to work without a helmet. And that reason lay inside a black safebox I had hidden here a day ago.

Unlocking the box, I saw all the contents within had gone untouched. The seeker remained cradled in a bed of linen, appearing as the centerpiece. I brought it out and set it to the side. This wasn’t what I planned to investigate first. Tsuya had said the seeker worked with the mites. Those elusive buggers were nowhere near the surface, so I figured my research on that would be limited.

My target lay under the false bottom of the safe. There were questions I needed answered. Kidra had shared the recording of events at the bunker and we’d both poured over the details, trying to figure out what was going on.

The technical answer we arrived at was ‘What the fuck.’ It was pretty clear I’d only get my answers once I studied the Occult. We’d tabled it for later, on her part because of the sheer amount of paperwork she’d taken on, and on my part for the busy work of executing that paperwork. I’d been marching around the clan drumming up support. Kidra had planned a return to the light, but that wasn’t going to happen without some effort and legwork. New servants needed to be hired, subcontractors from the Logi castes needed to be brought onboard to handle the numbers, and a hundred other smaller details.

Finding the spare time to sneak out and study the Occult was an oddly difficult task to juggle. Especially since this wasn’t something I could even let a tiny hint escape. People would ask questions about why the second armor in House Winterscar was absent.

A bit of digging around brought me back into the present and I found the latch to lift up the false bottom. Talen’s metal safe box reflected the ambient light, giving a slight glint. I brought that up wholesale and set it down. It’s odd to consider that this tiny box might just be the most important moment in my life. I twisted the handle and opened the box.

The panel protecting the interior slid open, revealing the thick tome of metal. I could hold the spine in one hand, but it certainly stretched my fingertips. Despite how beefy it looked, most of the space was taken up by the thicker sheets of metal and the velum material that separated each. I don’t think there are more than fifty sheets within the whole thing.

Now that I was using my eyes to see the surface, I saw what Atius had. There were indeed words inscribed on the surface sheet. The same ones that the clan lord had read to Kidra and I.

I gingerly flipped that first sheet of metal and moved onto the second.

To begin to understand the Occult, one must understand that the occult was not made for humankind. It came into being as a part of the universe, far before our time.

There are three rules to the Occult that defy logic and have no means of explanation. All remaining rules of the Occult can be derived back to these original rules in some form.

The first rule of the Occult, and the root from which all stems: Reality can recognize patterns.

I’d hoarded books and stories whenever I could. There was one point that was quickly understood, the Occult as I knew only became a thing after the annihilation of the world. There was a whole range of history that just didn’t exist, wiped off the face of the world. That happened to a lot of things, where Old World humans would reference items or concepts that used to be a thing but no longer existed.

The Occult was one such term. Old world humans saw the Occult more like stage magic - pentagrams, black candles, goats on the altars. But past the information blackout, the Occult re-appears in more modern stories and history, this time as an actual force of nature. If reality truly did have runes of some kind that it bowed to, those symbols wouldn’t look artistic like the Occult of the old world, with written words scribbled on the sides for effect.

So then, what would reality itself recognize as a pattern? I traced through the words inscribed into metal.

These patterns are commonly called Fractals, though they do not always equate to the mathematical term. Some cultures have used the word ‘Glyphs’, ‘Sigils’, or ‘Marks’ - or what I assume are actually Occult fractals.

The source of these patterns came from chaos theory, a branch of mathematics people of the old world studied. Chaos theory are equations which are inherently unpredictable. Even beginning with the same conditions and input data, the result would deviate from the previous calculation.

Yet, if repeated again and again, some show patterns. And if that pattern appears, unerringly, no matter what data is used, the pattern will always appear. As if inscribed into the very fabric of the universe itself. The language of deities.

The metal slab ended there. Hastily, I flipped the sheet, reading the next page.

The second rule of the occult: Electricity ignites these patterns.

It was discovered that these patterns will remain inert until an electric current is run touching the pattern. The material does not matter, although it has traditionally been plates of metals due to ease of conduction and access. The size, or location of the pattern does not matter. The strength of the electric current does not matter.

The third and final rule is that all patterns connect to a single concept. When active, that concept is manifested upon the world. There are an infinite amount of patterns within chaos theory, and of those patterns, there is a sub-set of patterns that reality will acknowledge. Within that smaller infinity, lies an even smaller sub-set in which the concepts represented by the inscribed glyphs map to human understood concepts.

To wield the Occult is to seek out and record those unique patterns of reality, and then bend them to your will.

I took a pause, digesting the information in the dim light. This must be why Tsuya had referenced ‘The soul fractal’ - that could be the pattern that matches the ‘concept’ of soul?

Which brought another question: If the Occult was a force of nature that pre-dates humanity, and all life in general - then why is there a fractal for a human soul? What exactly is a soul in the first place? Was this universal, in such a way that the soul was a concept that already existed before life even developed?

The Occult is split into two masteries. In the first order of mastery, an inscribed glyph can be activated with no other action. These glyphs connect to simple concepts. Simple glyphs such as ‘Heat’ or ‘Division’ - They can be used by anyone, even in ignorance.

The second mastery is far more elusive and known only to a handful. These concepts require willpower to shape and manifest the concept into the world. The white wizards of Tanrok draw their powers from this branch of Occult.

For many years, I could not understand how they could connect to the Occult in such a way as to command it. They hoarded that knowledge, protecting it from anyone.

Urs, a colleague and technomancer, once told me that all knowledge was a grand cycle of discovery, destruction and rediscovery. That the eras constantly cycled around mass extinctions and resurgences. Each iteration of history leaves behind traces the next cycle uses.

I took his words to heart and discovered these cycles applied to the Occult as well. The Wizards were simply the next iteration that had reignited the torch of knowledge - a fact that in their hubris, they had forgotten and thus left unguarded. And so I went searching for the original torch.

Their predecessors were long extinct tribes that revered shaman chieftains, who were capable of wielding what was most likely the Occult. Once I began to search through their ruins, I found the truth.

The shamans hadn’t found a way to directly command the Occult. Instead, they found a workaround - a patch of sorts - to enter the framework and command it from within the system.

I flipped the page again and what I saw next instantly connected with what I’d seen before. Specifically in Kidra’s video footage. Winterscar had released a tendril of its spirit, which had touched the sides of the console and left an etching of a fractal. That fractal had begun to glow bright occult blue and the whole bunker came to life after that.

What I was staring at was that exact fractal. I felt my hair stand on edge, hand brushing on the cold metal fractal. Under it was one more paragraph of text.

This fractal, the Julia Set, is known as the Soul Fractal. This is how the wizards, and the shamans before them, are capable of embedding intent into the Occult - they have embedded their souls into the system, granting a direct connection.

To truly wield the occult, forge a soul fractal and infuse your soul into it. This is the first step to becoming a wizard.

I’d never heard of wizards. Given the age of this tome, I had a suspicion these wizards were to our modern day warlocks analogues like the shamans had been to them. The previous iteration of humanity. No idea what happened to the wizards, either they got stomped out or slowly changed to become something different.

I slowly unclasped the metal bindings, freeing up the sheet of metal. It was rigid enough that bending it was outside the realm of my own human strength. Lifting it up, I held it between both hands.

All of reality would recognize this glyph, according to the book. The words that surrounded it were nothing to reality. The material the glyph was inscribed on was equally unimportant - only that it could conduct a current.

“Journey.” I spoke, licking my lips and preparing. “Pass a small current of electricity through this plate.”

“Affirmative.” Journey chimed. And then the glyph began to glow in my hands, exploding in color. Occult blue dyed the room as the inscribed glyph came to life. The lazy wind within the room began to swirl around me, kicking up dust that reflected the occult light. At the center of this slow moving malstrom, the soul sense within me flared to life.

The same connection as when I had held Atius’s blade. A sense that I could activate something.

There was no hesitation. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and dove forward.

Next chapter - The realm of souls